On Being a Teen, part I

Being a teenager was hard.  I won't begin to say otherwise.  I had very different worldviews than either of my parents and my mother (bless her heart) to this day is a complete enigma.  I also was desperately afraid  of romance and males in any capacity other than the strictly platonic kind.  Part of it was the pressure associated with relationships, part of it was my fierce independence (see how I can make it sound so empowered?  ha!), part was due to trauma associated with a series of random awful events involving the opposite gender.  A lot of it was not wanting to answer to anybody.

---I'm sorry, I just have to stop for a second.  As I type this, I'm laying next to my husband, who is fast asleep and giggling happily.  Very strange to be jolted back to the present after trying to explain my past, if only to myself, and to find myself *so pleased* with the fact I got married at 21.--

Right, back to trying to explain my actions as a teen. I felt like I couldn't relate to most people around me, which I'm assured is par for the course, but I felt particularly lonely and particularly private.  OH.  Getting ahead of myself.  Still talking about boys.  Yeah, terrifying.  I could have a pretty decent friendship with a male peer until they said anything that could be construed as even remotely flirty by even the most paranoid of individuals (me), and I kind of turned into a mean person.  I got awkward.  I made sarcastic comments.  I actively sabotaged.  I wanted nothing to do with them.  I flat refused to go on most dates and when I did, I insisted on not liking the guy.  WOO! Damage! Relationships are and were scary.  I saw tons of people who were getting married quickly and ruining their lives in my opinion.  I got really uncomfortable in church when emphasis was put on finding your future priesthood holder.  I didn't want any of it.  I wanted to be alone.  I wanted to live for myself.  I didn't want the relationship I perceived many people around me having, not that there's anything wrong with them in retrospect.

  This is going to be a bit painful, but I found refuge in the internet.  Not in online dating or anything even remotely of the sort, but I trolled the internet for debate and found groups of people I identified with, who I found intellectually stimulating, who I could associate with regardless of whether they happened to flirt, whether I felt well, whether my mother felt like letting me go out, and they had such different worldviews than anybody else I knew.  They were from all over and had opinions and thoughts I'd never heard before.  Some of these people grew to become my friends and I developed some of the best friendships of my life so far.

ANYWAY.  It might not come as a surprise that despite all of this, I still had the regular teenage makeup.  Still having heart jumpy feelings upon watching romcoms, the whole bit, and sometimes I even developed some feelings for a far away friend or two, because they felt safe!

I know it's taboo to talk about friends on the internet, let alone to have them, but coming up on ten years down the road in some of these friendships and they're still some of the best I've ever had.   A perk of growing up is that I've been able to spent quite a bit of quality time in person with these same people.  They are still awesome.  It actually annoys me a bit that I'm a little embarrassed to talk about this, simply because it's 2012 and seriously, some of the best, most supportive people in my life, people who got me through my teens, were originally happened upon on the big scary internet.  These people (mostly in a community--so everybody knew each other) helped make me into a better person than I ever could have been otherwise.  Not saying that I'm awesome now, but I definitely could have been a lot worse.

This is so rambly.  I will stop now. 

Childhood part I

I was born to an eccentric genius and the perfect woman. I was the 7th of my mother's 8 children, 10th of my dad's 11, and the only living girl. My parents decided mere days before my mother discovered her pregnancy with me that they were going to have no more children. They had tried for a girl repeatedly and it hadn't happened. When I came along, they were surprised and overjoyed.

I don't think any girl can live up to that kind of pressure.

Some of my earliest memories are of playing with firecrackers with my brothers in the sandbox, blowing up army men, and of a secret club they allowed me to peek into. They referred to it as "fire secrets". They made bombs. I wanted to be just like them. I was seven years younger than my youngest older brother, however, and my glimpse into my brothers' world was stunted by my age, gender, and propensity to tattle tale. More than anything I wanted a sister. Then Blake came along, and I made him into one. We were best friends and enemies, and had a childhood not easily replicated, I'd wager.

Immediately behind my childhood home is a gigantic field, behind which stands a hill referred to by the locals as the 'R' hill. That field became a vast wilderness in which we hunted for treasure, collected old bottles of various shapes and colors, and had all manners of adventures. Also behind my home is my dad's own personal junkyard, referred to lovingly and exasperatedly as "the mess" by my mother, who does not believe in messes. My dad had a collection of hundreds of cars, tanks, gravel, wood, mattresses, old appliances, mysterious sheds with mysterious belongings, stacks of tires, various pieces of equipment, flanges, strange bolts and parts, and even an old school bus and all manners of treasures all strewn about and divided by winding dirt roads on two acres of childhood heaven. The stack of wood was our ship, the mattresses, our trampoline, the "H tanks", a secret meeting place. The tire stacks became space capsules we huddled in and communicated to each other through old stretches of hose we ran from one to the other like those string and cup telephones your teacher helps you make in kindergarten.

I never went to Disneyland. Disneyland was my back yard.

On finding love and losing my religion: part 1.

I've always been an awkward person. Maybe not always. Okay, Perhaps always.

Right now, I'm laying down next to my husband in my childhood bedroom in Roosevelt, Utah, and I'm thinking about my life so far. I'm in pain. It's physical. My heart though, is pretty full.

I'm happy to be where I am, I think. Part of me though, is bewildered at how I ended up here; married and areligious, when once, not so long ago, for more than seventeen years of my life, I was described as anti-male, even cynical, and according to one church leader, perhaps even lesbian, and a devoted Mormon.

I have decided it's time to work out what happened, and what better forum to air the most intimate details of my life than a public one, eh? This makes me nervous, but I'm going to buck up. Maybe somebody somewhere will stumble across this and identify with part of it. Maybe my hypothetical future children will want to understand what their mother was thinking at a ripe 22. Maybe I'm just feeling particularly mortal today. Maybe I'm anticipating maybe being cooped up in a small apartment in Texas this summer, maybe recovering from heart surgery.

In any case, this is the beginning of an attempt to tell my life story. I guess I'll start with childhood.

Not my first rodeo (blog)

So, I've had zillions of blogs, but none written with the intent to actually update people I know. It's taken me a year to come up with the idea that maybe it'd be cool to keep people updated of my life at school, etc. School's out in two weeks and I don't even know where to start.

In twenty minutes I'm going rock climbing in Logan Canyon. I started climbing because a close friend of mine is really into it and I needed a class that would make me be physical, because I have absolutely no motivation to be active by myself. Also taking pilates for that same reason.

I can say that pilates and rock climbing are equally grueling. I intend to keep on with both of them. I may even buy climbing gear, but I'll decide that later, it's a lot of money and I'm afraid of commitment.

I've got to get ready to leave now. Later.

Late night PS: Just realized I haven't actually *been* to a rodeo.